TF1230.. the unfinished card

[terriblefire]

This is what was going to be a dirty cheap A1200 030 card for the A1200...

50Mhz 030 with frequency control. 128mb ram. maybe some second IDE port.

tf1230.PNG

But since the main people who would want this are currently telling me i'm every arsehole under the sun on ppa.pl... there is no chance i'll finish it.

[Gooeyblob]

Hi Stephen,
Have you posted this in the right area, not sure as many people will see it here?
Also the ReAgnus would have been a much needed replacement.
You mentioned developing for the Spectrum, may I ask what ideas you have for that?
Thanks for all your hard work over the past few years.

[stephen_usher]

That's really sad.

Why is it that there are so many people like that in the retro-computing hobbyist community?

Actually, it's not just there it's in the whole computing community in general. Some of the open source software people are complete egotistical nastards too. ("Works for me: WONTFIX", "You're banned for ordaining to question the perfection of my code. How dare you send a bug report!" (Yes, I've had that.))

[exxos]

It brings us back to the whole philosophy of open source stuff again :roll: There is always pros and cons to everything unfortunately.

I do publish my older stuff which I no longer plan to manufacturer.. But I would never open source any of my current stuff, even though the Atari market is extremely small, I can pretty much guarantee someone would rip it off and start selling it before where chance to produce my own boards in my store. For example, I had so many issues with the V2.2 booster.. I think I spend nearly a grand in PCBs, a lot of them were six layers and were not cheap. If I open source that right at the start, I would just run out of money extremely quickly and it would be game over for me.

But for Atari stuff, a hot sale for me is like one thing a month. In terms of the TF536, I think I must have sold like 200 in the past month... Terriblefire can sell off new boards easily and recover costs in that batch, He gets his money back and gives the design to the community for free.. and make things open source which makes perfectly sense to me that does..

But this would not make sense to people like me who have relatively low sales because it will take a incredibly long time to recover the costs. It pretty much locked me into closed source projects as I literally have to protect my investment.

If terriblefire went with the same philosophy to protect his work, this would lock him into going to sell the boards himself programmed with firmware and code protect fuse blown so people could not clone the firmware.. But I think terriblefire does not really want the logistics part of it all, in reality I don't, but I still have to operate that way.

The only workaround I can see for terriblefire, if one day he wanted to continue the boards, just not make them open source anymore, and only give the files to people who currently produces his Amiga stuff,then either charge a royalty for sales or supply PCBs to recover development costs.

In any case, is just how the world is, the 0.1% of people who screw it up for everyone else. Likely never going to change.

[fluffyfreak]

There's still a lot of people, me included, that would like to see this happen so it's a shame that it's dead.
It looks almost physically complete!

Learning how to do the PCB layout is much harder than I thought, that and having to learn VHDL/Verilog (I'm doing a Udemy course), is gonna be great long term but at this rate it's gonna take years before I'll get around too it like I hoped.

[arkadiusz.makarenko]

Out of curiosity. Do you think TF330 firmware would work out of the box? Or would you expect to adapt it to A1200?

[8 Bit Dreams]

Will not because of PCMCIA stuff i think, @arananet tried to port TF330 to A1200 and ran in a lot of problems, his card was not working as far i know 🤔

[arkadiusz.makarenko]

Will not because of PCMCIA stuff i think, @arananet tried to port TF330 to A1200 and ran in a lot of problems, his card was not working as far i know 🤔

Isnt PCMCIA on Zorro 2 memory range?

I am curious. Maybe it is time to build A1200->CD32 adapter to find out.

[8 Bit Dreams]

Not sure about PCMCIA 🤔
About adapter - it was done by Edu already:

IMG_20200602_172314-scaled.jpg

IMG_20200601_205028-scaled.jpg

Nothing really works with it as much i know,
except for Vampire A1200 🤔

[arkadiusz.makarenko]

I think this would need connector other way round with socket connectors?